Spanish Theatre Trades in Tickets for Carrots

The Spanish government recently put a 21% tax on theater tickets, and Spanish theatres are fighting back to keep sales up. According to the NPR, the theatre owner in a small Spanish town is avoiding the tax by selling carrots instead of tickets, then allowing his carrot customers to attend a performance for free.

He told NPR “We said, ‘This is the end of our theater, and many others.’ But then the next morning, I thought, we’ve got to do something, so that we don’t pay this 21 percent, and we pay something more fair.”

“We sell one carrot, which costs 13 euros [$16] -– very expensive for a carrot. But then we give away admission to our shows for free. So we end up paying 4 percent tax on the carrot, rather than 21 percent, which is the government’s new tax rate for theater tickets.”